“Extending Research on the Victim-Offender Overlap: Evidence From a Genetically Informative Analysis”, 2012-04-14 ():
Criminologists have long noted that offenders are more likely to be the victims of crime as compared to non-offenders. What has not been established, however, is why there is a substantial degree of victim-offender overlap. While numerous explanations have been advanced and a substantial number of studies have been conducted, there remains much to be learned about the etiology of the victim-offender overlap.
The current study pushes this line of research forward by offering and testing a unique hypothesis: that victimization and offending share a genetic etiology that leads to victim-offender overlap. Findings culled from a sample of sibling pairs drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health indicated that:
genetic factors [heritability] explained between 51% and 98% of the covariance [genetic correlation via bivariate Cholesky decomposition] between victims and offenders. Nonshared environmental factors explained the remaining covariance, while shared environmental factors explained none of the covariance.
Implications and interpretations of these findings are considered.
[Keywords: delinquency, victimization, victim-offender overlap, behavior genetics]